First I deleted Camera Raw cache & the entire Previews folder, then rebuilt all previews (1:1)

This made no difference

Then I renamed my old catalogue, restarted LR4, created a fresh catalogue and imported all my images, creating 1:1 previews on importl finally I read in metadata from disc.

This seems to have improved matters somewhat - there is still a noticeable but not unbearable lag when zooming, but more importantly, sliders are no longer laggy - it works about as well as LR3.6 in this respect.

For me this wasn't too much of a hardship as I have less than 3K images.

The major downside is I have lost all the autostacked raw+jpg/virtualcopies, and detailed history for each edit.

If this improvement is not sustained as time goes on I will of course report back

Something has to give somewhere, using the full upgrade to LR4 and working with 5DmII & 7D images and it's unuseably slow. Reimporting images is too much of a task also having a current library of over 300k images. I am going to need an energy drink for the night ahead of me.

Something has to give somewhere, using the full upgrade to LR4 and working with 5DmII & 7D images and it's unuseably slow. Reimporting images is too much of a task also having a current library of over 300k images. I am going to need an energy drink for the night ahead of me.

Sorry you are having problems...a couple of things to try assuming your speed hit is in Develop (it's useful to spell out EXACTLY where LR is being slow). If you are using noise reduction in PV 2012, try turning off the apply switch in the detail panel. New in LR 4 is the attempt to try to render the noise reduction at any screen view. This take cpu clicks...if you turn off the noise reduction while doing other work, it'll speed up the responsiveness of other adjustments. Other things that are known to tend to slow things down are lens correction and tons of local correction.

Again it would be far more useful to know EXACTLY where your slow downs are coming from...I'll also say that due to the adaptive image nature of PV 2012, a lot more cpu cycles are being used. Not for nothing, but if you are running a lot of other apps in the background that are stealing cpu cycles, that will also add to the speed hit. I have issues when running LR and photoshop at the same time but LR by itself seems to be fine...YMMV.

You all really need to be explicit in your reports of slowdowns and what your OS & processors are, ram and other things running.

i see the incredibly slow response in LIBRARY module, all i am doing is - working in a folder with ~200 images, using the filmstrip view and scrolling between images using the arrow key as i scored the images (1-5).

if you need more details please (hardware or software) please let me know.

i see the incredibly slow response in LIBRARY module, all i am doing is - working in a folder with ~200 images, using the filmstrip view and scrolling between images using the arrow key as i scored the images (1-5).

Are these images that have already had previews made? Are you looking at the images in Loupe View? (as apposed to the thumbnails inside of Library) Once you've got the images imported, have you given LR enough time to render the previews?

I wouldn't expect major slow downs when viewing Fit Image size in Loupe unless you haven't gotten the standard previews rendered...if you are viewing at 1:1 and you haven't made 1:1 previews, I would expect that to also be slow'ish.

This is an entirely different animal than having slow response time to adjustments made in Develop. That's why it's super critical to know exactly where the slow downs are and what people are doing when they see a slow response.

I would expect moving between Fit Image zoom views to be pretty fast (no lag) after you've made the standard previews after an import. If you are importing and immediately trying to Loupe the images, yes I would expect slow downs.

Using LR4 out of the box, I've created quite a few mapped locations & develop presets but that's it.

Upon launching LR, sometimes it won't ever show that there are images across 9 hard drives in the catalog. All of the date folders are greyed out. If I close LR4 and re-open it, generally within 3-6 minutes, it will show the image counts in each folder. When in Develop mode, I have the same complaint as so many others, you move the clarity slider from 0 to 18 and it's a 30-60 second turnaround. When clicking on a preset I have created, sometimes you don't ever get the image updated with the new settings.

LR3 also gave me major speed issues and was not snappy at all and I was hoping LR4 would remedy that.

Currently working through 1,200 images from a wedding and I'm able to multi-task to other design projects while I'm waiting on LR.

Upon launching LR, sometimes it won't ever show that there are images across 9 hard drives in the catalog. All of the date folders are greyed out. If I close LR4 and re-open it, generally within 3-6 minutes, it will show the image counts in each folder. When in Develop mode, I have the same complaint as so many others, you move the clarity slider from 0 to 18 and it's a 30-60 second turnaround. When clicking on a preset I have created, sometimes you don't ever get the image updated with the new settings.

When you imported the 9 drives of images...did you actually try to use the previews or did you simply upgrade a LR3 catalog? Big difference...when you import images either from a CF car or a previous catalog, LR has to "know the images" meaning it needs to have loaded and previewed all the image you may look at. Initially after an import, particularly before the previews are done rendering, it takes a while for LR to absorb the image data and organize the previews. That's why sometimes it shows a grayed out drive/folder name and sometimes shows the three dots next to an image preview and sometimes shows the preview as a grey square...that's normal for new use of an import or catalog. This tends to go away over time (once LR works in the background to fully enter in the database records and makes previews).

This has nothing to do with potential slowdowns when in Develop. Unless you explicitly tell LR to make previews, it doesn't do it as a foreground function, it does it as a background operation. Which means anything you may do in the foreground will impact (negatively) the background operations.

With regards to the Develop slowdown (and entirely different animal) again I would ask whether or not noise reduction has been applied/turned on. That is a cpu hog when dealing with any images whose noise reduction is other than zero.

For the engineers to understand what's happening, the reports of slowdowns need to be less emotional (ranting) and more informational. That's the only way to try to isolate what's going on for some but not impacting others.

slideshow works nice, and library mode is fine.... little lag there, but for me it's not bad.

in develope mode... as i start to edit an image (dual monitors on) the more i edit the more it lags to the point on complete 5 second frustration.... sliders wait seconds to move then jump.... everything just starts to lag dramatically to the point of total frustration. Of course unselecting details section helps.... as does turning off the dual monitor view.... slightly, but, i'm really hoping this isn't they way I'm expected to use the software.

some other notes: works really nice on my macbook pro with single monitor view and a DRAMATICALLY smaller catalog. Just a little sluggish if i get to crazy with edits and detail perameters. Otherwise, very useable in this way.

thanks everyone for all the posts... good to see i'm not alone on this.

Here is part of the library list, which is pretty standard. When importing all of these, I didn't import the LR3 catalog, if I remember correctly, it told me it wasn't valid for one reason or another (I may be losing it, I really don't remember) and I just used the Add function in the Import options to get them in to LR.

in develope mode... as i start to edit an image (dual monitors on) the more i edit the more it lags to the point on complete 5 second frustration.... sliders wait seconds to move then jump.... everything just starts to lag dramatically to the point of total frustration. Of course unselecting details section helps.... as does turning off the dual monitor view.... slightly, but, i'm really hoping this isn't they way I'm expected to use the software.

There are reports that something about dual display is really, really slow....it would be useful to know if this is a facot. Can you go to single display and do the same steps and see if you are getting the same response?

So, based on your screen shots, I would expect the Develop module to be slow showing images zoomed in since the Develop previews are ripped not from the LR previews but directly from the raw file. Again it would be useful to know whether or not you've applied and noise reduction.

Just understand the Library and Loupe views are using the previews rendered by LR when you import. When you go to Develop, LR must (by nature) re-render the whole raw file to present a color accurate rendering which will include any noise reduction you've applied. It's not at all surprising that moving image by image in Develop in the film strip is slow unless you've visited that image before.

Again, all of these reports of "slowness" are separate and distinct. You may not realize how LR works, but there is a standard practice that would be useful to follow. Wait till LR is done rendering standard previews, then use Loupe view to view the images, if you want 1:1 (100% previews) that's gonna take time to generate. No free lunch...getting pixel level info takes time.

Makes sense to me, I'm working on files that were imported in to LR3.6, but I didn't start touching them until after I had download 4 and re-imported everything. I will work on being patient with it and allow it to do it's job. Having each image between 20-30 mb on average can be a strain I'm sure.

I move the Exposure Slider and my CPU shoots to 100%. I lose control of the Exposure Slider. The CPU does not settle down for about four to five seconds.

That's with LR4.

In LR 3.6 with the three items set to On I can move the Exposure Slider. The CPU raises to 90% (never 100%) and drops back to zero or 1% or 2% within a second. I never lose control of the Exposure Slider.

A C G - my experience is nearly identical to yours, though I find the NOISE slider to be the worst. Every experiment I have tried, the deifference in the amount of CPU usage and even memory usage between Lr4 and Lr3.6 is generally huge. Then a red hearing pops up. After my 30th reboot, I opened Lr4 intending to create yet another new catalog and try something differet but when I did I noticed it opened faster than before.So I clicked on the develop module and fiddled around and BAM, without me doing a thing, all sliders seemed perfectly responsive. I then opened up my resource monitor and sure enough, resource usage was no longer peeking. I flipped through a few pictures and tried developing them Here too the things were quite responsive. I can't explain it. I closed the catalog, opened my "real" catalog, which has over 30,000 images, and it was right back to being slugissh. So, I fiddled for a while, closed my 'real' catalogue and opened up the test catalogue and BAM, it was slugish again. ARE YOU KIDDING ME! The hardest problems to fix are one that can't be reliably reproduced. Until now, the slugishness issue has been a near constant for me. I have no idea how this is possible. Ugh.

I'm the guy who posted, probably last Friday, that if you uninstall the beta, remove all the lrdata files, reboot and install the paid up version you'll be OK. At the time I posted that I was.....but, like you, things changed for the worse.

I'm typing this msg on a PC that never had the beta. Initially LR4 was fine - and now it us unuseable.

I installed Lightroom 4 on a newly setup Windows 7 64bit computer and if I compare it to Lightroom 3.6 (running on a 5 year old box with an Intel Quad Core processor & 8GB Memory), Lightroom 4 is very sluggish with most adjustments, things get even worse when I enable viewing on a second monitor.

in develope mode... as i start to edit an image (dual monitors on) the more i edit the more it lags to the point on complete 5 second frustration.... sliders wait seconds to move then jump.... everything just starts to lag dramatically to the point of total frustration. Of course unselecting details section helps.... as does turning off the dual monitor view.... slightly, but, i'm really hoping this isn't they way I'm expected to use the software.

There are reports that something about dual display is really, really slow....it would be useful to know if this is a facot. Can you go to single display and do the same steps and see if you are getting the same response?

Thanks for askin jeff. I did switch to single display and it does make a considerable difference.... way less delayed responses and long winded redraws.

I tried to come up with a workflow like this, single monitor and no details panel active..... as these two things seem to me to be the killers...... but it still started to bog down in time as I worked with the sliders editing even without them options in my flow. I'm guessing here, but I don't think Adobe would want people with my computer specs to have to find work arounds to use their software. The dual monitors and details tab rock in LR3.

I'll try some new tricks tonight.... maybe rebuilding catalog files and previews, i'm just a little couscous when it comes to touching my catalog files... lots of work and time associated with those darn files

Thanks everyone. I'm glued to this forum until I can get this LR4 into my work-flow with dual monitor view. Absolutely love the changes to the develop module.

I've now tried so many different things to speed it up I'm losing track of which variables I'm playing with. For me, dual display doesn't make a diff unlike many of you... I was hopeful that creating a new catalong and importing everything again would help and I thought it it...In Library Mod, it seem to have sped up just a bit but still not a quick as 3.6 ( I regenerated previews as well)... In Dev Module its made NO difference- loading each file takes 2-3 seconds during which time everything greys out while it trys to read the RAW file.. .Someone posted that the 'engine' used to pain RAW files in Dev is the RAW file itself, while in Lib, its the LR preview file.... This could help to determine the root cause perhaps....

I've not messed with any other setting like noise, lens correction, etc...This is a direct import of CR2 files from Canon 5D MII and its still not usable in the Dev Module. Back to 3.6...

Dual display also didn't have an effect on my speed. It's slow all the way around overall. I had to keep working so as I posted earlier, I just continued editing until around 4 this morning while multi-tasking on other design projects while waiting on LR.

What's scary is the fact that LR4 is still so much better off than After Effects. That program is so great and yet almost unuseable due to the bugs.

Like many others, I use LR3 daily and it blazes even when I enable the 2nd screen. If LR4 survivied BETA but is now having issues with it must be connected to differences in the HW platforms. I am one that never installed the LR4 BETA.

Running Vista-64 SP2

LR 4.0 64 bit

PS CS 5.1 Extended 64 bit (configured to use 48% of available RAM)

Notes:

1. Adobe DL link for my purchase failed so I had to use the Trial Download to install and license application. Perhaps just an issue with the Trial Build?

2.I have two monitors but rarely use the 2nd for LR.

3. I didn't notice the perf hit unitl AFTER i had messed with the MAP and BOOK module and AFTER I had performed an import of some fresh JPEG images.

4. I have messed with catalogs, changes in settings and viola - things appear better - but I can't be certain the changes I made caused the improvement or just another restart. But one thing is clear, after I run another import the system slugs again. It really feels like the import module is triggering the change for me. I just imported 100 JPEGS (small) and it took 4 min 35 seconds and the LR4 perf is totally hosed again.

4. Response is just as others have described but best place to see the hit for me is the crop tool under DEVELOP module. It isn't just slow, it painfully repaints the screen in ways I have never seen before in LR1,2,3.

5. I get sluggish reponse with or without PS5 running. Also, if I run PS5.1 first I can run LR4 but if I load LR4 then try to open an image from LR in PS5.1 the system has tendenancy to hang. I am used to flipping between LR and PS with extreme regularity.

It feels like memory managmenet has been severly broken and/or the GPU isn't being used (I thought LR exploited GPU) or the GPU use is being interrupted so I see this on again/off again behavior perf behavior. (NVIDIA GTX280)

The Lightroom team is investigating this problem. Right now we attempting to nail down the specific issue/ issues. Just be aware that development may go dark on the forums while trying to research this problem. In addition we may be contacting people individually for more information.

Possible solution: I left LR4 running for 10 hours w/o using it and now it's much faster, almost at LR3.6 speed. Perhaps it was converting my large catalog (82K photos) in the background which was slowing everything? I hope the speed lasts!

Yes, same conditions for LR3 and LR4 : LR3 was fast, LR4 is very slow. A trick indicated by a user, make LR4 working better but after a certain time, rebooting or so, LR4 is becoming slower. So much posts concerning speed (actually very low speed) couldn't be only the fact of users configurations. My LR3 library is 30 more bigger than the one of LR4, configurations are the same concerning previews aso.. Even DxO which was not the fastest RAW software in the past, is now faster as LR4 !

Curious thing that even LR3 was a little bit slower from time I installed LR4 beta, replaced now with released LR4.

I think I will not upgrade to LR4 until I've retrieved speed of LR3, particularly because from my personal point of vue, LR4 is NOT a major release.

I am on a Quad 4GHz machine w/ 12GB of ram. My catalog & images are on 550MB/s read/write SSD drives. Yet LR4 is very sluggish. LR3 was responsive (still slower than I would like, but worked fine), LR4 is almost like running a Java app at times.